automotive-ai
(30)
The AI Chip Company That Sells No Chips
Expedera’s founders looked at neural networks and saw an old networking problem. Their answer is a packet-based engine that chipmakers can license, resize and tuck into everything from phones to cars.
The 45-Year-Old Software Company Teaching Car Dealers a New Dashboard
Pinewood.AI spent decades hidden inside a dealership empire. Now it is selling one database, fewer bolt-ons and automotive-trained AI to dealers around the world - with a £545 million take-private deal waiting at the next junction.
VINCUE Built One Dashboard for the Seven Systems Hiding Behind Every Used Car
A Kansas City dealer was using seven systems to manage one piece of inventory. VINCUE turned that frustration into a single operating layer - and now it is teaching dealership software to anticipate the next decision.
Yaron Saghiv Is Making the Awkward Car Inspection Harder to Argue With
The former consumer-marketplace founder now sells a wonderfully unglamorous idea: cars should arrive with receipts. At UVeye, Yaron Saghiv has turned computer vision into a language of trust for dealers, fleets and drivers.
PureCars Found a $250 Million Blind Spot in the Dealership Ad Budget
Car dealers do not lack data; they lack a clean way to act on it. PureCars built a business by connecting the messy records in the dealership basement to the ads, messages and appointments happening upstairs.
UVeye Put Cars Through an MRI. Then the Hard Part Became Trusting the Bill.
The Israeli-American company escaped a narrow security market by teaching its undercarriage scanner to spot leaks, rust and tire wear. Its next test is not whether the cameras can see more - it is whether customers trust what happens after they do.
Brian Hoang Bought a Porsche. Then He Built an AI Receptionist for Car Dealers.
A first exit paid for the car that pulled a young software founder into dealership culture. His second company is turning all those missed calls, scattered logins and neglected leads into one very large systems problem.
Linda Gray Put Twenty Years of Software Into the Repair Bay
She went from a teenage Knicks fan site to Microsoft, Pokémon GO, and an AI company built for independent garages. Now Mastertech.ai has a new owner, and Linda Gray’s next job is making sure the hard-won memory of the repair bay travels with it.
Hyunggi Cho Bet on the Part of Self-Driving That Had to Ship
A cafeteria conversation became a nine-year lesson in automotive patience. Hyunggi Cho built Phantom AI around the unfashionable idea that the road to autonomy begins with driver assistance people can actually use.
The $199-a-Month AI That Turned Old Repair Orders Into a Shop's Best Technician
Independent garages already owned years of diagnostic wisdom - it was just buried in old invoices. Mastertech.ai made that memory searchable, charged shops for the privilege, and found a larger home inside AutoVitals.
Phantom AI Stopped Chasing the Robotaxi - and Sold the Safety Layer Every Truck Was Missing
A bruising highway demo exposed the gap between autonomy theater and dependable safety. Phantom AI spent the next eight years making the less glamorous bet - affordable software that can see a pedestrian, fuse a radar return and help an ordinary vehicle stop.
Cars Commerce Wants to Be the Operating System Behind Every Car Sale
Cars.com built the audience. Now its parent is connecting that traffic to dealer websites, appraisals, advertising and wholesale auctions - a bid to own more of the messy journey from search box to showroom.
Impel
Impel started by teaching the internet how to walk around a car. Now it is trying to run the conversations, follow-ups and service reminders that turn a vehicle listing into a customer relationship.
ArcSoft
ArcSoft spent three decades teaching cameras to do more than record a scene. Now its code improves phone photos, reads the cabin and helps cars understand the road - usually without the person using it ever seeing the name.
Mia Labs
Mia Labs is an Austin-based AI company building Mia, a voice-first conversational platform for automotive dealerships. Marketed as an 'AI super employee,' Mia answers inbound and outbound calls 24/7 across a dealership's sales, service, reception, and parts departments, syncing with dealer management systems, CRMs, and scheduling tools to capture leads, book appointments, and handle routine customer conversations. As of early 2026 the platform served more than 350 franchise dealerships and had raised a $20M Series A, bringing total funding to roughly $29M.
EPIKAR Inc
EPIKAR is an AI-first technology company purpose-built for automotive retail. Founded in Seoul in 2016 by former BMW Group Korea executive Bosuk Han, EPIKAR digitizes and automates the vehicle purchase journey - from lead capture and 24/7 self-service showroom access to AI-powered consultations, test drives, contract conversion, and aftersales service. Its modular platform is already deployed at Renault, BMW, and Volvo dealerships in South Korea, and the company has relocated its headquarters to the United States to test AI showroom kiosks in the world's most mature car market.
Quadric
Quadric is a semiconductor IP company that licenses the Chimera family of general-purpose neural processing units (GPNPUs) - a single, fully C++ programmable processor core that runs machine learning inference alongside classic DSP and control code in one unified architecture. Founded in 2016 by three engineers who previously built bitcoin computing hardware, Quadric aims to fix the fragmentation of on-device AI silicon: instead of a fixed-function neural accelerator that breaks whenever a new model appears, its cores scale from 1 to 864 TOPS and can adopt new networks - including large language models up to 30 billion parameters - through a software port rather than a chip respin.
Deepen AI
Deepen AI is a Silicon Valley company building the data lifecycle infrastructure for autonomous systems and physical AI. Its platform combines multi-sensor data annotation, sensor calibration (LiDAR, camera, radar, IMU), and validation tools that carmakers, robotics firms, and AV developers use to turn raw sensor data into reliable training data. Founded in 2017, Deepen also co-created Safety Pool, a global scenario-sharing initiative launched with the World Economic Forum and WMG at the University of Warwick.
Joseph Burke
Joseph Burke is the co-founder and CEO of Ottometric, a Waltham, Massachusetts software company that automates the validation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous-vehicle software. An engineer by training who entered the ADAS field in 2010 building radar and blind-spot detection for an airbag maker, Burke started Ottometric in 2019 to attack a brutal industry problem: validating a single vehicle model can cost automakers over $100 million and take more than a year. Ottometric's platform uses proprietary data-distillation technology to turn oceans of raw sensor data into structured safety insights, cutting validation cost and time by more than half. The company has raised roughly $14.9 million, including a $10 million Series A in April 2025.
Ottometric
Ottometric is a Waltham, Massachusetts software company that uses AI to automate the validation and training of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous-vehicle software. Its platform distills petabyte-scale, multimodal sensor data into decision-ready KPIs, cutting validation cost and time by more than half for the Tier-1 suppliers and OEMs that build the cars' eyes and reflexes.
DeepRoute.ai
DeepRoute.ai is a Shenzhen-headquartered autonomous-driving company building full-stack self-driving software, from Level-4 robotaxi systems to mass-market driver-assistance for production cars. Its DeepRoute IO 2.0 platform - powered by a 40-billion-parameter Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation model running on NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Thor - is being shipped by Great Wall Motor and a handful of other OEMs.
Junhwan Kim
Junhwan Kim is the CEO of STRADVISION, a South Korean AI perception company building the vision software that teaches cars to see. After selling his facial recognition startup Olaworks to Intel in 2012 - the first full acquisition of a Korean firm by Intel - he pivoted into automotive AI and helped build STRADVISION into a company with over 3 million cumulative production units deployed, $331M in total funding, and a pending KOSDAQ IPO. His flagship product, SVNet, runs on 50+ vehicle models across 13+ OEM partners and can identify pedestrians, lanes, traffic signs, and obstacles in real time on low-power edge chips.
Michael Gilson
Michael Gilson is the CEO of Conversica, the San Francisco-based conversational AI company behind over 1.5 billion automated customer conversations. Appointed in April 2025, he has repositioned Conversica as 'The Conversation Company,' expanding its AI agent platform from sales automation into automotive data intelligence, sports and entertainment ticketing, and enterprise customer lifecycle management. A Princeton graduate with a background spanning enterprise SaaS, media technology at Telestream, and data analytics at Wiser Solutions, Gilson brings operator instincts to a company that pioneered AI-to-human conversation at scale.
STRADVISION
STRADVISION is a Korean automotive AI company building SVNet, a deep-learning vision perception software that lets cars see and understand the road in real time. Its lightweight networks run on low-power automotive chips and ship in production vehicles from more than a dozen global automakers.
Jeffrey Chou
Jeffrey Chou is the CEO and co-founder of Sonatus, the Sunnyvale-based company building AI-powered software-defined vehicle platforms for the automotive industry. A serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a track record of exits to Cisco and Brocade, Chou co-founded Sonatus in 2018 with Yu Fang, applying datacenter-era thinking to automobiles. Under his leadership, Sonatus has raised over $110 million, won the 2022 PACE Innovation Partnership Award with Hyundai, and deployed its platform across more than 6 million production vehicles globally from Genesis, Hyundai, and Kia.
Sonatus
Sonatus is a Sunnyvale-based automotive software company building the AI-powered, software-defined vehicle. Its Digital Dynamics platform - including Sonatus Updater, Automator, Collector AI, and AI Director - lets automakers deploy, monitor, and update vehicle software and edge AI models without rewriting code. Sonatus technology is in production in over 6 million vehicles, including models from Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis.
Michael Deng
Michael Deng is the founder, Chairman, President, and CEO of ArcSoft, a Fremont, California-based computer vision and AI imaging company he started in 1994 with $150,000 from family and friends. Over three decades, he built ArcSoft into a global leader powering the cameras of Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, Sony, and dozens more, then pivoted to automotive AI vision - driver monitoring, ADAS, and in-cabin sensing. When ArcSoft listed on Shanghai's STAR Market in 2021, Deng became a billionaire with a stake valued at roughly $1.1 billion. Today he's steering the company into AI glasses, XR headsets, robotics, and AIGC creative tools.
Sanjay Dhawan
Sanjay Dhawan is the CEO of SymphonyAI, a Palo Alto-based vertical AI software company assembled by entrepreneur Romesh Wadhwani. He spent thirty years moving between operator and founder seats - co-founding Inkra Networks, running Symphony Teleca through its Harman acquisition, leading Cerence from a $500M Nuance spinout to a >$5B market cap, and now scaling SymphonyAI across retail, financial crime, manufacturing, media, and IT operations. He is also Chairperson of Pioneer Corporation and a Senior Advisor at EQT.
Todd Mozer
Todd Mozer is Chairman and CEO of Sensory, Inc., the Santa Clara-based company he co-founded in 1994 that has quietly powered voice recognition in over 3 billion consumer devices - from the 'OK Google' and 'Hey Siri' wake words to smart home gadgets, automotive systems, and medical devices. A second-generation tech entrepreneur (son of physicist Forrest Mozer, with whom he also co-founded ESS Technology), Todd holds 50+ patents and an MBA from Stanford. He has spent 30+ years making AI run tiny, private, and always-on - long before the rest of the industry caught up.
Nikhil Naikal
Nikhil Naikal is the CEO and co-founder of Kinetic, the automotive infrastructure startup using AI, computer vision, and robotics to automate the calibration and digital repair of modern vehicles. A roboticist with a PhD from UC Berkeley and an MS from Carnegie Mellon — where he was part of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge-winning Tartan Racing team — Naikal previously founded Mapper.ai (acquired by Velodyne Lidar) and engineered AR software at Flyby Media (acquired by Apple). At Kinetic, he is building a national network of high-throughput digital repair hubs that slash ADAS calibration time from hours to under 15 minutes, backed by $31M in total funding including a $21M Series B led by Menlo Ventures.